While celebrating his then-crowning achievement -- overcoming rival Hamden Hall in his high school baseball Divisional Championship -- Milford native Ken Jacobi was beating back a nagging concern.

After the game, the young player and his teammates lingered on the baseball diamond. They basked in the glory of their triumph and willed the sun not to set on the day that made them victors.

“We refused to take off our grimy jerseys because we all feared the same thought; the next level will be different,” wrote Jacobi, a Norwalk resident who leads Greenwich’s Young Professionals Group, in his book “Going With The Pitch.”

“We were not sure how, but we all worried that the innocence of the game would disintegrate with the new pressure of college baseball,” he wrote.

In the years since that triumph, Jacobi has felt the flush of victory and acknowledged the sad truth that he wasn’t baseball star material. His story — and his insights into college sports and life beyond — have made him a regular at baseball recruiting and coaching conferences and eventually led to “Going with the Pitch.”

“...but with this it would become a lesson that others in a similar situation could read and study for both their betterment and the improvement of a team,” he wrote in chapter 20. “I would be the guinea pig, sacrificed into the baseball black hole so that those after me could read my story and change their path, if even just marginally.”

Jacobi, who now works as a Treasury Associate Manager for PepsiCo., said he learned to love baseball in the idyllic baseball fashion -- from family. He fondly remembers attending major league games and going to batting practice with his father.

“We found community through baseball,” Jacobi said.

“Going With the Pitch” chronicles the ups and down of his baseball career. Its subtitle, “Adjusting to Baseball, School and Life as a Division I College Athlete,” begins with his high school dreams of playing college ball.

Technically, Jacobi is the protagonist of “Going With The Pitch,” but really, it’s the concept of change and adapting to it that drives the story.

His childhood love grew into high school competitiveness, where he was first humbled by the game, he said.

“I thought I would probably get recruited to play college ball,” he said. “Then I realized I was just one of many good players.”

In the early chapters of his book, Jacobi talked about falling out of love with baseball but still persisting.

“It had taken a lot of work, time, and effort to rekindle the flame that had almost been smothered,” he wrote of his high school baseball career. “...Being so close to hitting that low, I broke down and cried once at home after the championship game. I was obviously happy about being part of one of the most remarkable comebacks of my career, erasing a major late inning deficit, but more importantly I recognized that there was nowhere else in the world that I would have rather been than on that field.”

Jacobi found plenty of material and guidance to help him through the college recruiting process, he said.

His dreams of attending a top southern school, where warm weather provides a better backdrop for the spring sport, altered when a strong offer from SUNY Binghamton, a Division I school, arrived.

Once he was on the upstate New York campus grappling with actually being a college athlete, there wasn’t much out there to help him with learning to succeed as a college student and college athlete, he said. No advice he could glean from a book or movie available at the time prepared him for the emotional and psychological barriers he’d face.

That prompted him to keep recording his experiences in a journal and eventually turn them into two editions of “Going With The Pitch.”

His experiences are outlined in his book: arriving on campus as a freshman, he discovered the coach who recruited him, and the only one on staff who’d seen him play, was gone. He struggled to regain his footing with a new coach, a new team and a new understanding of his place in the world.

“When my confidence went, everything went with it,” Jacobi said. “I had to learn to separate the game from my personal life.”

By the time his senior year rolled around, Jacobi had given up his distant dream of making it to “The Big Show,” taking off much of the self-inflicted pressure to be perfect, and it was his most enjoyable season, he said.

He finally learned the trick to overcoming the biggest obstacle of all: himself. The lesson, which he tries to teach readers through his writing, is “to be ready to be ready,” he said.

Something in life is going to go differently than anticipated, he said. Life is a series of choices about how you’re going to react to those situations.

Both in his book and in his discussions about the book, Jacobi is forthright: He admits he could be a selfish player, that he’d sacrifice his batting form to get the big hit and even that he’d fall into sulking after games.

That’s the real goal, Jacobi said. People don’t read his book because he was an MVP slugger or famed manager. He was pretty average, he admits, as most athletes wind up being, and that’s why his story is relevant to so many.

“I haven’t saved the world,” Jacobi said. “But I know I’ve helped someone and it’s kept me connected to the game...I love it more now than maybe I did even before.”